5 Worst Development Crunch Stories in Gaming

It seems like every other week, we learn about horrific cases of crunch in game development. Developers working inhumane hours, around the clock, so a video game can meet its deadline and make a host of investors and board members very, very rich.

These five stories dive into the public stories of crunch on some of the most high-profile games of the last 25 years. Some you may know about, others may come as a surprise  - so let's dive right in.

NetherRealm are known for bringing us some of the best fighting games in the modern era of gaming. From the newer Mortal Kombat games to the fantastic Injustice games. Unfortunately, they’re also known for the excruciating crunch time that they’ve repeatedly given their employees over the years. It’s been reported that staff were facing work weeks of 90-100 hours while being paid an unfairly low salary, with many taking overtime just to be able to afford bills. 

This hasn’t just been a one-off predicament either. NetherRealm has a history of pushing its developers to the edge from game to game. As reported by Andy Chalk and Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer, Isaac Torres, a QA tester on the first Injustice game, had said, “I crunched for about 4 months straight… I was regularly doing 90-100 hour weeks and worked every single day”. He later goes on to say, “I would get to work at 9 or 10 am. I would leave at 2-3 am. And then that process would mostly repeat itself.” Now, this was all the way back in 2012-2013 and in the years since, it doesn’t seem like NetherRealm has improved the way they treat their employees. 

 Jumping to development on Injustice 2, Rebecca Rothschild was a QA analyst during the years of 2014-2016 and faced very similar treatment to what Isaac Torres reported. They said, “I was working 90-100 hour weeks for both titles. I can personally say from my recollection that nothing improved from MKX to Injustice 2. Everything was down to the wire. Everything was worse.”

Rebecca goes on to say that as a QA analyst, they made $12 an hour working at NetherRealm and that without the crunch time, they “likely have had to settle for a different job and industry”. This goes on to a wider discussion of unfair salaries for developers in the industry, considering just how much money the higher-ups claim for annual bonuses and salaries in general (*cough* Bobby Kotick *cough* Andrew Wilson *cough*). A former concept artist at NetherRealm Studios who contributed to Injustice 2, Beck Hallstedt, posted on X about the money situation at the studio, saying, “Some folks have been doing this for 4+ years. Some folks have gone into huge credit card debt b/c of it. Because of this NRS's contractors NEED overtime to survive. They NEED the time-and-a-half pay to make rent”. 

If crunch time wasn’t bad enough, from all reports, it sounds like the QA team were left with little to actually do during this time. After being told to stay behind for crunch time, Isaac Torres said that it was “totally mismanaged” and that many in the team were “sat around waiting several hours for a new build”. Rebecca Rothschild later backed up Isaac by saying that during her time working on Mortal Kombat X and Injustice 2, QA would spend hours with nothing to do. 

On top of all that, many employees at NetherRealm also claimed that they faced bullying, harassment and sexism. When they reported these issues to the higher-ups at NetherRealm, NetherRealm decided to “lawyer up” and released a statement saying that they are prioritising a “positive work experience” and are “actively looking into all allegations”.